The eight-legged creature, which looks like a spider, has been christened Chimerarachne Yingi. While the creature has a few body parts similar to a spider, its uniqueness is a 3 mm "long flagellum, or tail."

Speaking of the tail, KU's Paul Selden explained: "Any sort of flagelliform appendage tends to be like an antenna.

Ancient spider-like creature with a tailUniversity of Kansas

"It's for sensing the environment. Animals that have a long whippy tail tend to have it for sensory purposes."

According to Seldon, [the new fossils] are like the missing link from older animals and modern spiders.

Seldon and another lead author, Dr Giribet, suggested that C yingi belonged to a group of extinct spider relatives called Uraraneida, which had tails.

Researchers believe that C yingi fills a massive gap in the evolution of the nearly 50,000 species of spiders that spin webs and trap preys around the world.

"It's a missing link between the ancient Uraraneida order, which resemble spiders but have tails and no silk-making spinnerets, and modern spiders, which lack tails," said Bo Wang, a palaeobiologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing and another lead author of the study.

Selden added: "Spinnerets are used to produce silk for a whole host of reasons: to wrap eggs, to make burrows, to make sleeping hammocks, or just to leave behind trails."